Microsoft and AI: spending billions to make millions
Microsoft has carefully leaked the news of its BIG SALE of Copilot licenses to Barclays Bank! 100,000 seats! Fantastic! [Bloomberg, archive] That’s a few million dollars? If that. Microsoft claims …
Spending $80 billion to earn $30 million. Impressive.
Who's willing to sponsor me, trying to do better?
I mean not to defend Microsoft but this is how it works when you’re starting a new business with new technology. All of big tech is spending billions in a gamble to be one of the few who survive when AI as a tech matures and only market leaders are able to make a profit. It will be a tiny profit margin but they will be the only ones making money out of it.
People are losing their ability to objectively judge things due to their hate of the tech. It’s not great for everything and it’s certainly not good left on its own but it does speed things up under the supervision of someone who knows what they’re doing.
it does speed things up under the supervision of someone who knows what they’re doing.
That's the problem. Nobody knows what they're doing, and the core concept of the technology is designed to make people dumber.
Someone made that argument for computers.
Look I’ve found immense value in AI. It has helped me set up my own homelab with 0 knowledge of Linux or selfhosting in a fraction of time than it would have taken on my own using Google. And the kicker, I’ve learned a few things, enough that I don’t need the training wheels of the Ai most of the time.
It’s great for giving it expenses for an entire year and have it categorize them by merchant. I can do it myself but it takes seconds for ChatGPT to do it.
It’s great to get ideas to write marketing drivel just to keep your visibility. I never post anything it writes as it spits it out but with some polish it’s not terrible and it really speeds up the time it would take to write something no one is going to pay too much attention to anyways.
Mid journey has been great to illustrate my little world building project that no one will ever see.
Sure it sucks for customer service. It’s terrible at being an encyclopedia since they are trained to always have a response, even when they have no idea. But to say the tech is not incredibly useful is naive. I get that people are tired from it being pushed, so am I. I know that sometime soon many services that shoehorned ai just to say they have ai will either drop it or refine it so that it is actually useful .
It’s a good tech being used badly.
